In 2012, Mr. Lee left Hong Kong and returned to the United States to live with his family in Virginia. F.B.I. agents investigating him searched his luggage during a pair of hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia, and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information. It is unclear why Mr. Lee decided to risk arrest by coming to the United States this month.

In the books, Mr. Lee had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers, according to court papers. Prosecutors said that material in the books reflected the same information contained in classified cables that Mr. Lee had written while at the agency.

According to FBI sources, FBI agents and other personnel have been told unequivocally that they are not to have any dealings with the White House, and that doing so risks career-ending measures.

As for Congress, the FBI for years also has stonewalled overseers under both Comey and Mueller.

Even routine requests for FBI documents and information have been rejected or ignored, and congressional overseers have not taken action to force the FBI to comply.

The lack of congressional oversight and administration controls have left the FBI with enormous power and little accountability.

A federal grand jury indicted Jose Ines Garcia Zarate on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and of being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm. Garcia Zarate is the person a San Francisco jury recently found not guilty of killing Kate Steinle. Each of the new federal charges against Garcia Zarate carries a maximum ten year sentence.

So, here’s the math: Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, won nine out of ten votes among Virginians who approve of President Donald Trump. He lost nine out of ten votes among those who disapprove. He lost by nine points.

Later:

Because of the inflation of the American presidency, there often is a countercyclical partisan effect, usually felt in midterm congressional elections. Americans like to complain that Washington never gets anything done, and they have a marked preference for divided governments that help keep Washington from getting anything done. Trump is an unpopular figure, and an obnoxious one. He likes being the center of attention, which means that he is going to be a factor in the mayor’s race in St. Petersburg and the governor’s race in Virginia. If the American electorate continues to have a low opinion of him, then Republicans should calculate that drag into their electoral expectations.

It is often the case that populism has a short shelf life, after which is ceases to be popular. There is a reason for that: Populism is almost always based on a false hope. Populist demagogues such as Trump arise when people are broadly dissatisfied with the national state of affairs and begin to lose confidence in critical institutions. Along comes a charismatic outsider — or someone doing a good impersonation of one — who offers an alternative. Trump-style populism is an almost entirely negative proposition: “I’m not one of Them.” What happens next is in most cases what’s been happening with Trump: The promise of radical change quickly gets mired down in the messy realities of democratic governance. (If you’re lucky, that’s what happens; absent the messy realities of democratic governance, what you end up with is Venezuela.) The “independent” man, the “outsider,” turns out not to have the experience, knowledge, or relationships to get much done. The savior doesn’t deliver the goods.

A Freedom of Information Act request obtained the inspection records for the Whole Woman’s Health chain of abortion clinics in Texas, and the results were ugly:

The documents show a widespread problem of health violations at WWH clinics. Staff failed to properly disinfect and sterilize equipment used on multiple women, and were not properly trained in the sterilization of surgical instruments. In 2011, the Beaumont, Texas, clinic did not have a registered nurse on staff, in contravention of legal requirements.

The lawsuit, filed on July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities.

The SAAR network is a web of over 100 purported charities, nonprofits, and financial firms, centered in northern Virginia, that were accused of laundering money for terrorism. The SAAR Foundation, the nucleus of the network, was set up in 1983 under the patronage of Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, a wealthy Saudi banking magnate who is strongly suspected of supporting al-Qaeda. The foundation was dissolved in 2000 after coming under U.S. terror scrutiny. Though federal agents uncovered staggering amounts of evidence against members of the SAAR network, political interference led to the case being dropped. As a consequence, entities within the SAAR network have been free to continue their activities and even influence American elections. The American public deserves a chance to see the evidence against SAAR figures and to break up their cozy political alliances with favor-seeking politicians.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel determined that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley violated the Hatch Act when she re-tweeted Donald Trump’s endorsement of a South Carolina candidate from her personal Twitter account.

A U.N. investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country’s military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to U.S. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings. The incident, many details of which were never publicly revealed, prompted the latest in a series of intense, if private, U.S. complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang, the officials said.

There is now a real risk that U.S. warnings about the referendum’s most dangerous consequences could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is almost certainly the case that the ferocity of Washington’s public opposition in the days leading up to the vote unintentionally gave the KRG’s neighbors license to bully, threaten, and punish the Kurds. Largely missing from U.S. policy was any corresponding campaign of equal seriousness to deter those neighbors from responding with retaliatory actions that would only escalate the potential harm to U.S. interests and regional stability.

Later:

The urgent task confronting Washington is to short-circuit the dangerous escalatory dynamic now at work before it gets further out of hand. A high-level diplomatic initiative backed by the world’s major powers could give the parties the excuse they need to pause, back away from the brink, and begin exploring options on how to move past the immediate crisis triggered by the referendum. Substantive solutions may not be immediately available, but the process itself, imbued with sufficient outside support from Washington and other great-power capitals, could buy valuable time and space to calm the waters, begin the search for workable compromises, and at very least keep the very worst from happening.

Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani passed away at age 83. Talabani was Iraq’s (largely ceremonial) president from 2005 to 2014, but he helped prevent factionalism from bringing down the Iraqi government. Talibani formed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a political party which usually enjoyed good relations with Iran, unlike his rival Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP).

For the last 30 years, the Puerto Rican government has been completely inept at handling regular societal needs, so I just don’t see it functioning in a crisis like this one. Even before the hurricane hit, water and power systems were already broken. And our $118 billion debt crisis is a result of government corruption and mismanagement.

The governor Ricardo Rossello has little experience. He’s 36 and never really held a job and never dealt with a budget. His entire administration is totally inexperienced and they have no clue how to handle a crisis of this magnitude.